By Cindy Mindell

September is Hunger Action Month, a nationwide campaign mobilizing the public to take action on the issue of hunger. Organized by the Feeding America nationwide network of food banks, the campaign brings greater attention to the issue of hunger in America and promotes ways for individuals everywhere to get involved with the movement to solve it.

The key to solving this worldwide plague is at the foundation of Jewish agrarian law, says Rabbi Andrea Cohen-Kiener, spiritual leader of Congregation P’nai Or of Central Connecticut. For the last 18 months, the Jewish Renewal rabbi and founder of the Interreligious Eco-Justice Network of Connecticut has been living on the 350-acre East Hill Farm in Middlesex, N.Y. in the Finger Lakes region. The farm is the residential campus of the Rochester Folk Art Guild, a non-profit organization founded in the ‘70s as an “intentional community” of artisans and farmers. Cohen-Kiener returns to West Hartford once or twice a month to lead services at P’nai Or.

While on the farm, Cohen-Kiener has been honing her Jewish agrarian skills – living with the resources of the earth as best she can as a Jew.

“I have decided that Jews do not understand our own texts because we are not farmers,” she says. “I am not in Judaea so the farm cycle in Middlesex doesn’t always echo properly. As Jews in the diaspora, we’ve made a lot of adaptations because we’ve been wandering for a long time. But that means we’re not in tune with the Torah.”

And that’s the challenge: How can Jews live according to the agrarian laws of the Torah, outside the land that the laws explicitly refer to?

In Scripture, Culture and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, author Ellen F. Davis describes the Torah as agrarian literature, a sort of ancient Farmer’s Almanac. It is the story of a people whose relationship with God is intimately tied to their stewardship of the land. Treat the land well and God will grant the right rains at the right time to produce food over the generations. Mistreat the land and there will be scarcity and famine.

The Book of Ruth is the ultimate handbook on the issue of hunger, Cohen-Kiener says, with its detailed description of the laws of pe’ah – “corner” – in action. The well-known story of Ruth picking up stray crops from Boaz’s field shows how the poor and the stranger were allowed to glean the corners of agricultural properties left intentionally unharvested.

“What we’re talking about here is in the social justice paradigm that is native to Judaism,” Cohen-Kiener says. “In the biblical culture of wealth, Ruth has what she needs, Boaz is rich because he has enough to feed himself, his workers, and strangers. This definition of wealth is not about accumulating; rather, everyone gets enough, both at the top and bottom, in a natural cycle. Then you don’t have hunger.”

To solve this modern-day plague, humanity needs a new shift, she says – not just thinking about the recipients of food donations but the potential donors: home-owners with backyards that could be planted with food crops like fruit trees.

“That’s what’s missing: the collective awareness that food comes from the earth, and growing it is what our labor is for,” she says. “In the Garden of Eden, our task was to ‘work and guard’ the land.”

The Jewish perspective on hunger is basic, Cohen-Kiener says: it’s the result of our lack of generosity. Deuteronomy 15 warns against being hard-hearted or tight-fisted with the needy.

“If we’re generous with each other, the land is generous with us,” she says. “If we reach out to others with mercy, the Holy One will reach out with mercy, connecting heaven and earth, and the earth will reach out with mercy in the form of food.”

Engaging in gardening for the collective good provides all participants with the advantages of meaningful conversation, ennobling work, physical exercise, and healthy produce.

“Everyone, wealthy and poor, benefits from clean, healthy, local foods,” Cohen-Kiener says. “Your wealth doesn’t protect you from everything – air pollution, floods in Iowa, toxic rain. Rather than be stuck in the ‘haves and have-nots’ model, how do we feed ourselves and each other with more connection?”

Part of the answer lies in renewing our relationship with the agrarian cycle of seasonal festivals, which feature communal meals like Thanksgiving and Sukkot, which celebrate the harvest.

Community Gardens

Another response to hunger is to create communal gardens, a project many Connecticut synagogues have taken on in their commitment to tikkun olam.

The Pe’ah Project at Congregation Mishkan Israel (CMI) in Hamden is probably one of the oldest such gardens in the state. Created in 1990, the 15-plot organic garden donates half of its crops to area soup kitchens – more than a ton every year. Volunteers from CMI and the nearby Unitarian Society of New Haven and Christ Presbyterian Church begin the planting season by studying biblical and rabbinic laws of giving to the poor, using them as guidelines over the growing season.

Pe’ah, Hebrew for “corner,” is the name of the sections of Mishnah and Talmud that discuss the laws of gifts to the poor when agricultural crops are harvested. The traditional Erev Yom Kippur Torah reading, Leviticus 19, lists the commandments by which Jews are to sanctify themselves before God, among them the directive that the farmer leave the corner of the field and the fallen grapes for the poor and the stranger to harvest.

It was that passage that got the congregation talking 25 years ago about how to translate the laws into action, says Rabbi Herbert Brockman, and led to the Pe’ah Project on the synagogue property. Since its inception, there has never been a shortage of volunteers, he says.

In addition to studying the laws of pe’ah from the Mishnah and Maimonides’s writings, Brockman has also had the gardeners explore early Zionist readings about the land of Israel. “The movement was not halachicly oriented but the land was important and there was a strong connection between the dual sense of avodah – Hebrew for work and worship,” he says. “Working the land and giving produce to the poor is worship of HaShem.”

The Temple Beth El Mitzvah Garden in Stamford was donated in 2009 by congregant Jared Finkelstein in memory of his parents as a way to unite the TBE community and teach the synagogue’s religious school students gardening basics.

Over the last five years, other gardens have sprouted on synagogue properties around the state. The Temple Beth El (TBE) Mitzvah Garden in Stamford was donated in 2009 by congregant Jared Finkelstein in memory of his parents as a way to strengthen the TBE community and teach the synagogue’s religious school students gardening basics. The garden is part of the congregation’s three-pronged mission to increase sustainability and improve the environment, along with a solar roof and a community-supported agriculture (CSA) arrangement with Chubby Bunny Farm in Falls Village, Conn.

Every fall, the b’nai mitzvah class plants tulips, used by the Reyut (friendship) Committee, and in the spring, first- and second-graders work in the garden.

Last year, volunteers planted, picked, and delivered 305 pounds of vegetables to Person-to-Person in Darien. So far this season, the garden has yielded 150 pounds for the social-justice organization.

TBE members of the CSA donate portions of their weekly produce delivery to the Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County in Stamford.

Jessie’s Community Gardens is a network of sites throughout Greater Hartford that combines produce-growing with social awareness to serve the community in various ways – from stocking food banks and pantries with fresh produce to teaching life skills and sustainability to fostering Jewish values. Named for Jessica Lynn Kostin, a West Hartford native who died suddenly in 2010 at age 26, Jessie’s Community Gardens was established by family and friends and the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford. There are 10 gardens planted in the region so far (and one at JCC San Francisco). Jessica’s parents, Michele and Dane Kostin, plan to establish 15 gardens in all.

Synagogue-based Jessie’s Community Gardens include Beth El Temple in West Hartford; B’nai Tikvoh Sholom in Bloomfield; Beth Sholom B’nai Israel in Manchester; and Beth David Synagogue in West Hartford, a joint project with Beth David’s neighbor, St. Thomas the Apostle. Gardens are also maintained in West Hartford at Hebrew Health Care, Jewish Family Services, the JCC Early Childhood Center, and Westmoor Park, and in Hartford at Charter Oak Cultural Center, and Judah House for women and children in transition.

Like Judah House, which uses the garden to teach farming as an empowering life skill, the Westport-based Harvest Now movement is expanding community gardens from synagogues, churches, and schools in Connecticut to prisons throughout the country.

The grow-to-donate program evolved from the Connecticut Bike Project, created in 2008 by Westport resident Brooks Sumberg in conjunction with Catholic Charities in Bridgeport and several other non-profit organizations. Sumberg estimates that the initiative has provided some 3,000 refurbished donated bicycles to low-income families, ex-convicts, and others unable to afford public transit.

That first year, when visiting the Catholic church that stored the bikes, Sumberg would notice that the on-site food pantry was more often closed than not. When he asked about the reason, the answer was simple: the shelves were bare.

Sumberg founded Harvest Now, encouraging Fairfield County synagogues and churches to plant gardens on their properties and donate the yield to local organizations that provide food to the hungry. The program has survived on one $500 grant and donations from its founder and volunteer gardeners. There are now 50 programs throughout Connecticut, at churches, synagogues, and schools. Since 2012, Harvest Now has also been taking root at prisons, starting with the Willard-Cybulski Correctional Institution in Enfield – which received donated seeds from the Hart Seed Company in Wethersfield – and expanding to 20 more prisons in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maine. Next year, gardens will be established at five North Carolina facilities.

“Feeding the hungry wouldn’t be a problem if we could get people to grow food,” said Sumberg, whose organization is partnered with the Connecticut Food Bank, Feeding America, Plant a Row for the Hungry, and the Garden Writers Association.

Sumberg is not new to hands-on humanitarian work. A “Kennedy kid,” he was inspired to join the Peace Corps in the early ‘70s, digging wells along the Tunisia-Algeria border and taking a break to volunteer in Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

After retiring from his business, the Westport resident served on the board of the Gillespie Center men’s shelter and still helps out there and with the Westport-based Homes with Hope whenever asked. “My friends all retired and they play golf, but I don’t golf,” he says. “It’s in my DNA to help. My parents were founding members of the temple in Larchmont where I grew up and gave their time to Jewish causes. I give my time to causes as well.”

So far, Harvest Now gardens have been responsible for more than 42,000 pounds of donated produce.

Congregation Agudath Sholom in Stamford is among three participating synagogues, along with Temple Beth David in Cheshire and Congregation B’nai Jacob in Woodbridge.

It was Agudath Sholom’s Rabbi Danny Cohen who first learned of Harvest Now from an article on the garden at First Presbyterian Church in Stamford, and he brought the idea to Chesed Committee chair Meredith Cohen. She and fellow committee members purchased supplies and solicited donations from friends in the landscaping business; a congregant who owns a fencing company built the fence and raised beds on the synagogue property pro bono.

The committee and fellow volunteers – from teens to seniors – work in the garden every Sunday. The first harvest, last year, yielded more than 200 pounds for the Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County in Stamford. Meredith says the garden is on track for the same amount this season.

To better understand the kind of impact grow-to-donate gardens can have, consider the statistics. According to a 2014 USDA report, in 2010, 133 billion pounds of the available U.S. food supply at the retail and consumer levels went uneaten. The UN reported that the wasted food could feed all one billion people around the world who are hungry. In the U.S. alone, every year, 33 million people must resort to emergency food sources like soup kitchens and food banks.

Harvest Now reports that there are some 84 million residential properties in the U.S. that can support gardens, each with an annual average yield of 100 pounds. Add to that the religious institutions and schools that could plant community gardens, and the impact is life-changing.

Expanding and strengthening the network of Connecticut religious communities that fight hunger is at the heart of the “Just & Holy Food” conference on Sunday, Sept. 14 in New Haven. Sponsored by the Interreligious Eco-Justice Network and Connecticut Interfaith Power & Light, the event will focus on food security, policy, and justice. Rabbi Andrea Cohen-Kiener is among the speakers.

“Just & Holy Food” Conference: Sunday, Sept. 14, 12:30-6 p.m.,
Common Ground High School, 358 Springside Ave., New Haven | Info/registration: irejn.org

For other educational and action resources on hunger: mazon.org and hazon.org.

Comments? email cindym@jewishledger.com.